“I welcome this new edition of
Oliver Cromwell Cox’s brilliant work. Published amid Cold War repression and
postwar racist violence, it is as fresh and urgent as ever. It stands not only
as one of the most incisive materialist analyses of race and racism but as a
true classic in the sociology of race.” —ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, New York University
“This touchstone book is second only to Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma as a
classic in the field.” —WERNER SOLLORS, Harvard University

Introduction

The term “ethnic” may be employed generically to refer to social relations among
distinct peoples. Accordingly, an ethnic may be defined as a people living
competitively in relationship of superordination or subordination with respect
to some other people or peoples within one state, country, or economic area.
Two or more ethnics constitute an ethnic system or regime; and, naturally, one
ethnic must always imply another. In other words, we may think of one
ethnic as always forming part of a system.

Thus, difference among ethnics may center about variations in culture, such as
those claimed by British, Afrikander, and Jews of South Africa; or it may rest
upon distinguishability, such as that of whites, East Indians, Bantu, and Cape
Colored of the same area. When the ethnics are of the same race—that is to
say, when there is no significant physical characteristics accepted by the
ethnics as marks of distinction—their process of adjustment is usually
designated nationality or “minority-group” problems. When, on the other
hand, the ethnics recognize each other physically and use their physical
distinction as a basis for the rationale of their interrelationships, their
process of adjustment is usually termed race relations or race problems.

Cultural or national ethnics and racial ethnics are alike in that they are both
power groups. They stand culturally or racially as potential or actual
antagonists. The degree of the interethnic conflict can be explained only by the
social history of the given relationship; and neither race nor culture seems in
itself to be an index of the stability of the antagonism. The status
relationship of both cultural and racial ethnics may persist with great rigidity
for long periods of time or it may be short-lived. The opposition between
the English and the Irish and between the Jews and Catholics in Spain are instances of rather long-time cultural
antagonisms. The Mohammedans and the Hindus in
Indiapresent a situation in which the formerly subordinated
Hindus are apparently about to take the place of their old Mohammedan masters,
but the centuries-old hostility persists. Both culture and race prejudices
are dynamic group attitudes varying in intensity according to the specific
historical situation of the peoples involved.1

Ethnic, political class, social class, estate, and caste may be compared.
Castes, estates, and social classes belong to or comprise status systems of
socially superior and inferior persons. These systems are peaceful, and
degrees of superiority are taken for granted according to the normal
expectations of the system. Lower-status persons are not preoccupied with ways
and means of demoting their superiors. When these systems are functioning at
their best, social acts recognizing degrees of superiority in the status
hierarchy are yielded with the same kind of alacrity as that which college boys
lavish upon their athletic heroes.

On the other hand, political-class and ethnic relations do not constitute
ordered systems but rather antagonistic regimes. Political classes tend to
break up the orderly working of a status system and struggle toward or against
revolutionizing it. The aggressive political class aims at social disorder for
the purpose of instituting a new order.2 Ethnics are peoples living
in some state of antagonism, and their ambitions tend to vary with the
situation. Some ethnics are intransigent; others seek or oppose assimilation;
still others struggle for positions as ruling peoples. In political-class
action not only status groups but also ethnics may be split to take sides on the
basis of their economic rather than their ethnic interests or status position.
On the contrary, ethnic antagonism may so suffuse other interests that
political-class differences are constantly held in abeyance.3

We shall discuss further the problems of national ethnics in a following
chapter, and we shall use the popular expression “race relations” to refer to
the problems of adjustment between racial ethnics.

The Concept—Race Relations

It is evident that the term
“race relations” may include all situations of contact between peoples of
different races, and for all time. One objection to the use of this term
is that there is no universally accepted definition of race. The biologist and
the physical anthropologist may indeed have considerable difficulty with this,
but for the sociologist a race may be thought of as simply any group of people
that is generally believed to be, and generally accepted as, a race in any given
area of ethnic competition. Here is detail enough, since the sociologist
is interested in social interaction. Thus, if a man looks white, although,
say in
America, he is everywhere called a Negro, he is,
then, a Negro American. If, on the other hand, a man of identical physical
appearance is recognized everywhere in Cubaas a white man, then he is a
white Cuban. The sociologist is interested in what meanings and
definitions a society gives to certain social phenomena and situations. It
would probably be as revealing of interracial attitudes to deliberate upon the
variations in the skeletal remains of some people as it would be to question an
on-going society’s definition of a race because, anthropometrically speaking,
the assumed race is not a real race. What we are interested in is the
social definition of the term “race.” To call that which a group has been
pleased to designated race by some other name does not affect the nature of the
social problem to be investigated.4

We may think of race relations, therefore, as that behavior which develops among
peoples who are aware of each other’s actual or imputed physical differences.
Moreover, by race relations we do not mean all social contacts between persons
of different “races,” but only those contacts the social characteristics of
which are determined by a consciousness of “racial” difference. If, for
example, two persons of different racial strains were to meet and deal with each
other on their own devices—that is to say, without preoccupation with a social
definition of each other’s race—then it might be said that race here is of no
sociological significance. But if their behavior tended to be fashioned by
ethnic attitudes toward each other’s actual or purported physical differences,
then the situation may be called a social contact between ethnics, and it may be
also referred to as race relations. However, these ethnic attitudes are based
upon other and more fundamental social phenomena.

1It appears that the principle of racial and nationality assimilation
laid down by Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole is too simple. As they see it: “. . .
the greater the difference between the host and the immigrant cultures, the
greater will be the subordination, the greater the strength of ethnic social
systems, and the longer the period necessary for assimilation of the ethnic
groups....The greater the racial difference...the greater the subordination of
the immigrant group... and the longer the period necessary for assimilation.”
The process of assimilation is further delayed if the immigrant is divergent in
both cultural and physical traits. There is probably some truth in this
birds-of-a-feather hypothesis, yet it seems that it may be too truistic and
crude for significant analysis of internationality and racial assimilation.
See The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, pp. 285—86.

2Abraham Lincoln was pertinent when in 1848 he said in Congress: “It
is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines and old laws; but to break up
both, and make new ones.” J. G. Nicolay and John Nay, Abraham Lincoln,
Complete Works, Vol. 1, p. 105.

3Edgar H. Brookes
describes the situation in South Africa which
illustrates this: “Economically the Poor White, the Coloured man and the
detribalized, urban Native are in the same category. Yet no political
party in
South Africa,
with the exception of the Communists, has made any serious or sustained attempt
to draw them all together in opposition to capitalism. It is most
significant that the Poor White proletariat of the towns does not in general
vote for Communist or even for Labour candidates; but for some Party—whether the
main National Party or not—which claims to be ‘nationalist.’ they are not
class-conscious. They prefer to join with their fellow-white men, even if
capitalists, than with their non-white fellow-workers. . . . As was long the
case in the Southern States of America, as indeed still is the case there, the
Poor White has sacrificed his economic to his sentimental interests, and the
immediate economic protection offered him on colour lines.” The Colour
Problems of South Africa
, p. 29.

4Cf. William Oscar
Brown, “Race Prejudice,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1930, pp. 4—5. It should be made
patently clear that the laboratory classification of races, which began among
anthropologists about a hundred years ago, has no necessary relationship with
the problem of race relations as sociological phenomena. Race relations
developed independently of anthropological tests and measurements.

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